Electrogenesis of Evoked Potentials. In: Başar E, Bullock TH, editors. Brain Dynamics. Berlin: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 1989. pp. 13-25. [DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-74557-7_3]

Neural integration at the mesoscopic level: the advent of some ideas in the last half century

History seen by a professional historian, based only on the documented record, always incomplete and liable to bias, can be unreliable. Modern history seen by a protagonist must surely be among the most unreliable. Yet, I must try, in a limited scope, to show the human drama as well as the flood on which we are floating, unable to dump the baggage of past biases. Our points of view, priorities, and positions on all the controversial issues and even the well established, noncontroversial ones, are not as rational as we would like to think but are strongly conditioned by where we came from. I wil depend on selected vignettes of the way things looked when I was a student, a young postdoctoral fellow and an Assistant Professor, to compare with the way they look now, in each of half a dozen mesoscopic domains--those in between the most basic subcellular or molecular and the higher levels of learning and cognition. The half dozen constitute, of course, anything but a representative fraction of neuroscience. But they add up to a nontrivial segment of the big picture with respect to the integrative aspects of our science. Most of the fronts that grew into today's popular branches are not represented, but a small set of particular interest and probability of further surprises.

Quantitative immunohistochemical and biochemical correlates of connexin43 localization in rat brain

We have shown by immunohistochemical methods that the gap junction protein connexin43 is heterogeneously distributed in rat brain (Yamamoto et al: J Comp Neurol 302:853, 1990). Here we have compared quantitatively the relative amount of connexin43 detected on Western blots of seven central nervous system (CNS) regions with the density of connexin43-immunoperoxidase reactivity in these regions. As has been observed on Western blots of several cell types, homogenates of these CNS regions contained two forms of connexin43, its dephospho form with an apparent mobility of approximately 41 kDa and its approximately 43 kDa phosphorylated form. While the relative quantities of connexin43 varied considerably among the brain regions, the ratio of the 43/41 kDa forms, 0.71, was relatively uniform (correlation coefficient, r = 0.92). Sections of brain processed for connexin43-immunolocalization by the peroxidase-antiperoxidase (PAP) method showed that chromogen deposition was linear with incubation time in reaction medium. Optical density of tissue connexin43-immunoreactivity in each of the seven areas plotted against the density of connexin43 bands on Western blots gave a correlation coefficient of r = 0.90. Connexin43-immunoreactivity had a similar appearance in sections processed by PAP or immunofluorescence procedures and consisted of isolated or aggregates of puncta.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)